


She Who Walks On

by skatzaa



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Jaegers (Pacific Rim), Kaiju (Pacific Rim), Minor Character Death, Poverty, Qui-Gon is a bit of an asshole in this but that's just who he is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-06-29 16:47:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19834384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skatzaa/pseuds/skatzaa
Summary: Shmi Skywalker gives birth as the world is ending, then picks herself up and keeps on living.





	She Who Walks On

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lady_Lombax](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_Lombax/gifts).



> Hello again! I hope it's alright to gift this work to you, Lady_Lombax, but it's the original fic I was working on for the multifandom fusion exchange. For a variety of reasons, I didn't have it completed by the deadline, but Shmi wouldn't rest until I finished telling her story.
> 
> To you all, I hope you enjoy it. This is a grimly hopeless world in which some people manage to find their own hope. I hope I did them justice.

The first kaiju makes landfall in San Francisco the same day Shmi drives herself to the hospital, gritting her teeth against contractions and clinging to the steering wheel like it is the only thing keeping her from falling to pieces.

She hears the sirens on the highways and decides to avoid them, sees the jets screening over head. Shmi feels the earth tremble beneath the tires of her car and watches the road crumble away in her rearview mirror. She catches sight of a giant silhouette on the horizon and doesn’t know what it meant. The world is ending, maybe, in a grand, dramatic fashion that’s probably fitting, considering all the chaos. On a much smaller and more intimate scale, it also feels like her own world is crumbling away.

There aren’t any beds open, they tell her. Even the maternity ward is full of the injured and dying. Injured by what, dying from what, they don’t tell her.

There’s no room for a woman only an hour into labor. The other hospitals? They’re full too.

Shmi holds her belly with one hand and grips the hand offered by a kind stranger with her other. She pants her way through each contraction and wishes she wasn’t alone. Kind strangers are still strangers, in the end.

Her son is born within moments of the monster finally being taken down, after nearly twenty-one hours of pain, devastation, and exhaustion, both big and small. She gives birth in a relatively quiet corner of the waiting room, with an exhausted, off-duty nurse as her only help. Her doctor is dead, someone tells her. She’s too dazed to react until later, when all the dust has settled, and by then so many people are dead, it’s hard to grieve them all. 

They don’t know what the monster is, or was, only that it wrecked miles of coastal urban sprawl and killed thousands. It’s massive, and it reeks like the deep ocean, and its blood is toxic. They know that it’s dead.

Shmi—finally, finally tucked away in a bed somewhere deep within the hospital, far from the maternity ward and the cramped waiting room that stunk overwhelmingly of fear—cradles her baby to her chest. She doesn’t know what happened to the previous occupant of her room, or just how badly her city has been damaged. All she knows, as she looks down at her son, sleeping fretfully in her arms, is that her own world will never be the same.

They call it a kaiju, because at the end of the day the Japanese have the most concise word for it. They scour the ocean floor for its origin but find nothing—it must have come from the deep, beyond the point even the most sophisticated of technology can reach. 

The world governments bicker and snap at each other over what to do with it. Eventually, they decide to cut it up and distribute it to scientists across the world for study, only to find that while they fought, the monster has already been scavenged. All that’s left has rotted away. People have begun to build around the bones, because they were too big and cumbersome for civilians to move. Its ribs are holding up half the neighborhood at this point, anyway. No point in dragging them away now.

Those on the world stage call it a kaiju, but most everyone in San Francisco just calls it the monster. But they also think it’s the first and the last, a freak anomaly that has no explanation in the natural world. Clean up begins once the bureaucrats untwist themselves, but little help is offered to those who have lost everything. No one suggests measures to defend against another one, because they don’t expect another to come.

They’re wrong.

Anakin is almost four when the second one bursts from the Pacific, half a world away. 

Shmi is working—she’s always working now, chipping away at the ever growing debt she owes to Watto, to live where she does, and Gardulla, to pay back her previous home, and everyone else—with Anakin strapped into a carrier on her back, because she can’t afford to pay someone to watch him. He’s too big to carry all the time, now, and her back aches constantly, but it’s what must be done, so she does it. Shmi doesn’t hear about it until she returns home to the bone slums. It’s the only thing she can afford after the kaiju destroyed her entire neighborhood and the lenders came to collect their debts.

The United States government prides itself on a lot of things. Support in the aftermath of disasters like this, protection from predation for those affected, is not one of the areas it likes to focus on.

A neighbor pokes her head out of her shack.

“Shmi,” Josa Whitesun says. Her face is drawn and bloodless. “Did you hear? There’s been another.”

Nothing else is needed; everyone has lived in fear of this day coming.

Shmi staggers, her hand rising to cover her mouth. On her back, Anakin complains sleepily.

“Where?” she asks.

Josa lost her whole family in the first attack with the exception of her daughter, Beru. Josa had been in the same hospital as Shmi that day because Beru had a fever, rather than at home with her husband, parents, and son.

“Hong Kong.”

Later, Shmi will hate herself, just the smallest bit, because of the relief she feels when she hears: _not here._ Other people are suffering, right this moment, some of them much more than she did in the first attack, and yet she’s glad that it isn’t _her_ , this time. But right then, she pulls Josa close and lets her friend cry on her shoulder and thinks _not here, not us._

They start naming them after the third one hits Sydney, when Anakin is six (six and a _half_ , mama, he corrects her every time).

They start categorizing them after Cataclysm wrecks Chimbote and claws its way into the Andes, two years later. The united might of the Americas’ air force only take it down because it gets stuck in a valley high in the mountains. They also cause a landslide so large it destroys several small village.

They can’t decide how to organize them—weight? Size? Body type? They can’t decide how to fight back, now that it’s clear that it will _keep happening_.

They don’t talk about fixing Chimbote, or cleaning the water to help the city’s devastated fishing industry, or helping those who escaped the destruction that was just as much caused by the airstrike as the kaiju itself.

They don’t talk about a lot of things on the global scale. Shmi keeps her ears open as she works—for gossip, for TVs left carelessly on, for brief snatches of radio stations she catches through the open window of the bus on her way home. 

Spineback rampages through Seattle and slips back into the Pacific before they can take it down. It emerges, days later, off the coast of Vancouver.

When Shmi finds Anakin and Beru in the Whitesuns’ house, watching the news footage with rapt attention, something ugly twists itself into a knot in her stomach. She strides forward and snatches the remote away from her son, clicking the power button. Anakin looks up at her, outrage clear on his small face.

“Mo-om,” he whines. “They were just about to take it down!”

Shmi glances at Beru before kneeling in front of Anakin. She takes his little hands in his. Turns them over, looks down at his fingers. He tries to hide it from her, but she knows he’s started picking up scrap metal and stripping wires, selling them to whoever will buy for the extra money, which he hides in her socks to find later. There are half-healed cuts and scabs on almost every finger.

“Ani, people are dying,” Shmi says, looking him in the eye. He pouts a little. She reminds herself, again, that he’s only a child. “I know it seems far away, but it isn’t. A kaiju could come back here, to San Francisco, at any time.”

She sees his eyes fill with tears and sighs. Tells him, “I don’t mean to scare you, my love.” She draws him in for a hug, motions for Beru to join them. “It’s important that you know the truth. The world is scary sometimes, and that’s why we need to help each other as much as we can, okay?”

The children both nod, faces hidden in her shoulders.

After Spineback is killed, there’s talk, like there always is, of international cooperation, of pooling funds for research. It usually dies down after the first month, once the dust has settled enough for officials to push the devastation out of their minds, but this time it doesn’t.

This time, someone comes up with an idea.

They call it the Jaeger Program. And, despite all the odds, the world rallies around it, pouring money into the project and the newly founded Pan Pacific Defense Corp. She sees Mace Windu, former USAF Colonel and the first elected head of the PPDC, on a television through a storefront once. He stands stiffly in a crisp new uniform and for a heartbeat she hates him for the way his buttons shine.

Shmi remembers building her house with her own hands out of scrap metal and old plywood, scavenged from destroyed buildings in the wake of the monster’s attack, and tastes something bitter creeping up the back of her throat. She remembers the smell of the city in the weeks following the attack, when the international community failed to react quickly enough.

The jaegers might end up being the solution; she won’t presume to know. She’s just a single mother living in the San Francisco bone slums.

Shmi isn’t normally one to despair her fate, but it’s hard not to, when she’s watching her child climb over the vertebrae of a monster that ruined countless lives. Inside, the radio blares, replaying an NPR interview with the first volunteers for the Jaeger Program.

She swallows down the urge to rage against the injustices and goes to make sure Ani and Kitster are being safe.

Just before Anakin’s tenth birthday, recruiters begin to visit schools. They start with the colleges and high schools, but are attentive to particularly gifted students regardless of age. Shmi hears about it on the news and feels her blood curdle when the newscaster begins to list some of the schools visited. She _knows_ those names; the bastards are focused on schools in low income areas in the city, the families most affected by the kaiju, even a decade later. The families that need the money, and one less mouth to feed.

She’s at work—working, always working—when one of the recruiters visits Anakin’s school. She doesn’t receive a call informing her. Instead, she takes the bus home, as usual. The closest stop is still six blocks out from her home, nestled as it is in the heart of the slum. The buses can’t get any deeper in the neighborhood; the alleys are too narrow and crowded full of people, no matter the time of day.

Shmi walks the six blocks, feet and back aching. Her second job will start in a few hours, but she just wants to go home and see her son, though the trip doesn’t help her exhaustion. The day is unusually hot, and she got off earlier than normal, so there is sweat pooling at the base of her spine and beading along her hairline by the time she gets home.

There’s a man there, large and strange, crouched low to watch on with interest as Ani and Beru explain the rules of their latest game to him. Her breath catches and Shmi hurries the rest of the way, feeling as though someone has reached into her chest and grabbed hold of her heart.

“Ani,” she calls, trying to sound normal. He looks up and grins, that same sweet smile he’s had all his life. It eases her worries, just a bit. “Who’s this?”

The man straightens to his full height, smiling gently. Shmi has to crane her head back to look him in the eye.

“This is Mr. Qui-Gon,” Ani tells her, attention still mostly fixed on the toy car he’s playing with. The man reaches out and she shakes his hand, briefly. “He came to our school today!”

Shmi’s blood turns to ice.

Qui-Gon must see something of her feelings on her face, because his smile becomes slightly more reticent. He gestures toward the house, and says, “Shall we talk out of the sun?”

Despite her reservations, Shmi nods. She swoops down to press a kiss to Ani’s cheek, then leads the way into her home.

It’s not the plywood shanty she built in the days after being released from the hospital, but she knows what it looks like to an outsider. Qui-Gon has the good sense not to comment and seats himself at the small table when she directs him that way. Shmi thinks about turning the kettle on and making tea, but decides against it. She takes the seat across from him instead.

“As you might have realized, I’m a representative of the Pan Pacific Defense Corp.,” Qui-Gon says. The man isn’t one for small talk, she thinks wryly. “We’re speaking with the families of individuals we think would have great potential with the Corp.”

Shmi breathes through her nose until she’s sure her voice will be level. “My son is nine years old. Sir.”

“I know.” Qui-Gon holds up his hands, placating. She wants to seethe and snap and order him out of her house. She doesn’t. They chose well, when they sent him to do this. Gentle, despite his size, and kind. Too old to be a recruit for the Jaegers himself, with the gray streaking through his long hair. “We won’t make you do anything, of course. But I would like to tell you more about the program, if you’ll allow?”

She grits her teeth and breathes. Nods. Keeps her jaw cemented shut, because she doesn’t know what would spill from her mouth if she opened it now.

When Qui-Gon speaks, he leans forward, elbows braced on his knees. He gestures with his hands but keeps the motions small and contained. His hair slips over his shoulder and he reaches up to tuck it behind his ear. The entire time, his eyes never stray from her face, but he’s not laser-focused to the point of leaving her uncomfortable.

Every moment of it is carefully planned and rehearsed, meant to make her feel important and cared about. The manipulation is masterful, she likely wouldn’t notice if she wasn’t looking for it.

Free room and board. Excellent education. A chance for a job when he’s older, however dangerous. Anakin doesn’t have to be a pilot, Qui-Gon tells her. Based on aptitude scores upon intake, he’ll be placed in the correct educational tract. Pilot, technician, engineer: just a few of the jobs the PPDC is projecting to develop, as the Jaeger Program develops further. Statistically, there will be fewer pilots than anything else. It takes a specific kind of person to be a pilot, and most people just won’t cut it.

Shmi looks out the door at Anakin, crouched low as he and Beru scheme. Thinks: you say that, but you don’t know my son. 

Shmi looks at her son, her very heart, and hates herself for even considering it.

Qui-Gon stands and gives her a nod that could almost be considered a bow. He hesitates, then reaches out and places his warm, large hand on her shoulder, the pressure light enough that Shmi could shrug him off if she so desired. She turns her face away.

“I’m sorry for putting you in this position,” he says. She can’t tell if it’s rehearsed or not, but genuine sorrow bleeds into his voice. “I can only imagine how hard this is.”

And then the anger is back, surging through her chest like the tide rushing in. 

“I don’t think you can,” she tells him, shifting just enough that she can see him in her peripheral vision.

Qui-Gon nods again, just once. The slope of his shoulders tells her _defeat_ , but she doesn’t believe it. He takes his hand back, reaches into his jacket, and pulls out a business card, which he places on the table.

“If you have any questions, please call,” he says. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Skywalker.”

Shmi doesn’t realize there are tears on her face until after he’s gone. 

Ani bursts into the house, still full of exuberant energy. Shmi wipes her face quickly, so he doesn’t see she was crying.

“Mom! What did Mr. Qui-Gon want to talk about?” he asks, launching himself at her. Shmi catches him and draws him into her lap for a hug. He leans into it for a moment before wriggling out of her arms.

“Nothing important,” she lies, watching as he crosses the room. “Ani, clean your hands. You need to have dinner before I leave for work.”

He only complains a little, but does as she asks.

She stares after him, feeling as though she is splitting down the middle, spilling out into the world and waiting for someone to notice and crush her.

Shmi thinks about it, all through her night shift and the few precious hours when she’s meant to be sleeping. She thinks about it the next day, and the one after that. She doesn’t want to send him away, doesn’t want to push him into a life even more dangerous than their lives in the bone slums. 

But then she thinks: free food. A roof over his head. Quality education.

That’s how they get you, she tells herself, bitterness clawing its way up her throat as she watches Ani wash the dishes after dinner. She’s trapped, and she knows it just as well as the PPDC does. 

She calls Ani over once he’s finished. When he’s curled into her side, she asks, “Have you heard about the Jaeger Program?”

His smile lights up his face as he dives into a detailed description of everything he’s heard at school and on the news. _They’re giant_ robots _and people_ control _them, Mom! They’re going to protect us!_

He acts out what he imagines a battle might look like between a kaiju and a jaeger, featuring a lot of explosions and screaming. And then he looks up at her, eyes wide and bright, and says the words that drive a spear right through her heart.

“I’m gonna be one when I grow up! So I can protect you and Beru and Kitster and everyone else!”

He’s just a child; children say such things all the time. It doesn’t mean that their desires and aspirations will remain static as they grow.

If she sends him away and he hates it, or feels caged and unloved, or gets _hurt_ , she’ll never, ever forgive herself.

Ani smiles. “You said we need to help each other. I wanna help, Mom.”

Shmi sighs. The words sit heavy on her tongue, and for a long moment she considers swallowing them down, ripping Qui-Gon’s card up until he’s nothing more than a memory. No, she decides. It would be a disservice to her son, if nothing else, to keep him from a life where he would thrive.

“Do you remember Mr. Qui-Gon?” she asks. Ani nods vigorously. “Well, he offered for you to go to a special school that will help you learn how to be a part of the Jaeger program.” She holds up a hand before he can excitedly interject. “I don’t know if it’s something we can do. But we can at least go visit Mr. Qui-Gon there and learn more about it.”

It takes a few months, because Shmi has to work extra shifts to be able to afford to take two days off. Qui-Gon—or the PPDC, she supposes—sends a car that takes them from the outskirts of the bone slums to the airport, directly to a private jet already waiting on the runway. Ani tires himself before they reach their final altitude and spends the rest of the flight curled up in Shmi’s lap, though he’s getting too big for that now. Another car takes them from the airport through the city and, once they’re out of it, toward the coast.

The car drops them off in front of the headquarters—the driver called it the Shatterdome, she thinks. It’s only been a few months, but the structure is almost finished.

Interesting, really, how fast the international community has mobilized itself, Shmi thinks wryly. She holds Ani’s shoulder with one hand as they stare up at it’s gleaming, metal bulk. She’s impressed, despite herself.

Qui-Gon meets them at the entrance, the wind off the water pulling his hair out behind him. He smiles down at Ani, then slightly-less-down at Shmi, and gestures them into the Shatterdome.

He shows them the half-completed jaeger bays, already holding the silent, hulking figure of a jaeger, taller than three men standing on each other’s shoulders. He catches Shmi’s considering look and says, “That’s Lucky Horizon. She’s only a prototype. The final jaegers will be much, much bigger.”

Shmi keeps her thoughts on that to herself, her hands folded together as Ani asks a million questions, his eyes lit up, trying to take in everything at once.

Then Qui-Gon takes them to the kwoon, where pilot candidates will complete most of their physical training, followed by the barracks, the cafeteria, classrooms, even some of the science and tech labs, so full of technology she doesn’t understand it makes her dizzy.

After, he sits them down in a thrown-together room that’s maybe meant to be his office, though Shmi sees no personal effects, and says, “Do you have any questions for me?”

She does. She has so many questions she can hardly remember any of them, sitting here in this gray metal box with her hands folded in her lap and her son next to her, looking at Qui-Gon like he hung all the stars in the sky. 

She asks, “If he enrolls, and later decides it’s not the right fit, can he leave?”

She asks, “If he places in a position once he’s trained, will he be paid?”

She asks more questions, as many as she can think of, and then, he asks the one that’s most important: “Is there any way I can come with him?”

Yes, Qui-Gon says, he can leave. Yes, the outlined salary is quite significant. No, he tells her, soft and apologetic, you can’t.

Shmi holds herself still, her breath frozen in her chest. She keeps her eyes fixed on Qui-Gon, because if she looks at Ani, she knows she won’t be able to hold herself together. 

She nods. Breathes. Says, “I understand. I’ll have to think about all this.”

“Absolutely,” Qui-Gon says, standing and leaning over his desk to shake her hand, hair falling over his shoulders. “You’re welcome to stay here for the night. There’s a flight scheduled to take you back to San Francisco tomorrow morning.”

Another missed shift then, if not two. Her chest tightens at the thought of all that lost income, but Ani is so excited at the thought of staying in one of the private rooms they passed—also gray and tiny and impersonal, a metal coffin not unlike this office—she can’t say no.

Three months later, Shmi steps out of the private car at the edge of the bone slums, because it can’t fit through the tiny streets. She has an eight block walk, two blocks longer than normal, since the driver didn’t listen to her and came at the neighborhood from the wrong direction.

She nods at the driver in thanks before closing the door. She has her bag slung over her shoulder and holds the strap tightly with both hands to keep herself from fidgeting. She has an eight block walk, and at the end of it waits her little house. For the first time since Ani was born, she won’t have him with her.

Shmi holds the bag strap tighter. She can survive this, just as she survived a pregnancy alone and raising a child alone and the world ending with no one but an exhausted nurse at her side. She can.

Shmi takes a step forward, breaking the unofficial line that demarcates the bone slums from the surrounding city, and she walks.

She works. Endlessly, she works every job she can find that will pay enough to support herself. It’s easier without Ani to pay for as well—though the first time she thinks it, she hates herself with the type of burning she usually reserves for the worst thieves and liars this city has to offer. Her life shouldn’t be easier without her son, but in some ways it is. 

Of course, in many other ways it isn’t.

Shmi works, and when she can find the time she sits at the little table in her little home—the same one Qui-Gon sat at when he first took Ani away, though she didn’t know it yet—and pens letter after letter to her son. He writes more frequently, long letters filled with his still childish handwriting detailing all of the new things he’s experiencing, the new people he’s meeting. The letters arrive in batches, like he can’t send them every time he writes a new one, but it means that Shmi has more of her son to keep with each new batch. And each time, she sits down and writes him a letter in return.

 _I made friends!_ One of his first letters says. _They’re cousins. Rex was born when the first kaiju came and that’s how he got his nickname. Fives got his because his cadet number has a lot of fives in it!_

He doesn’t tell her what his nickname might be, but Shmi writes back and says she would love to meet them some day. She doesn’t say that it’s nearly impossible for that to happen.

_I met Marshal Windu today! He’s sort of scary but really nice, I think you would like him, Mom._

_We’ve started the combat training sessions. I’ve never been so sore in my life!_

And on and on, until she has enough letters to fill several folders and eventually has to move them to a bigger box that she gets second hand from a neighbor.

In the meantime, Shmi works and works, until the ache settles deep into her bones and doesn’t leave, no matter what she tries. She works until there’s more gray than not in her hair, though she’s too young for that by many people’s notions.

She works, and she saves, and she tries to think of ways to get to Los Angeles, to get a job at the Shatterdome.

And all the while, the kaiju come. But now, the jaegers are there to stop them. Somehow, without anyone really noticing until after the tides have well and truly started turning, they begin to win.

The letters come less frequently as Ani grows, his handwriting sliding into the messy scrawl of adolescence. He does well in his classes, as Shmi knew he would, but the course load is also becoming more rigorous, and the younger cadets are finally beginning to really narrow down what their specializations will be once they graduate at sixteen.

(When she reads this, her heart seizes in her chest. It isn’t until after she receives a letter handwritten by Qui-Gon himself in response to her frantic questions, confirming that graduates who become pilots still won’t be deployed until they reach the age of majority, that some of the fear leeches away. But not all of it; never all of it.)

Beru gets scooped up right around her fourteenth birthday, just after Trespasser takes down Viper Serenity, killing both her pilots. She declares her specialization almost immediately—J-Tech— and Shmi has no doubt she’ll be an incredible technician. There are more kaiju now, coming every few months, and the PPDC needs as many new recruits as possible.

Shmi works, and aches even when she rests, and plans. By her reckoning, it’ll take another few years at least, before she has enough money to move to L.A. And even then, there’s no guarantee that they’ll hire her at the Shatterdome.

Then, just as she almost has enough saved to leave for good: Bonesplitter surfaces off the coast of San Francisco, and Shmi is powerless to do anything but hide in the public shelter, Josa at her side. The ones closest to the bone slums are small and cramped, and obviously a low priority for the city. She’s sure the shelters elsewhere along the coast are better equipped. But she can’t change that. She can only sit, and hold Josa’s hand, and think about Ani. He’s not eighteen yet, but she knows he’s finished his training already, and she can’t help but imagine him strapped into the cockpit of whichever jaeger they sent this time, fighting desperately to save as many people as possible.

Once Bonesplitter’s carcass has been hauled away, Shmi packs up her meager belongings, makes sure Ani’s letters are safely tucked away, hugs Josa goodbye, and sets out. She doesn’t know how she’ll get to L.A., but she’s going to make it there if it kills her.

Josa catches up before she’s even out of the slums, her own pack over her shoulder and her mouth set in a grim line. Shmi takes one look at her and finds she doesn’t have the heart to protest. With two of them together, it will be safer than traveling alone, and they can pool the funds they have. 

And she can’t leave Josa behind, not when she feels the same pain Shmi feels, knowing her daughter is out of her reach and constantly in danger.

It takes them time, hitching rides in short bursts, traveling as far as people are willing to take them. Some try to demand too much in return, and Shmi doesn’t know what she would do if she was alone.

They work in the towns they stop in between, trying to save up as much money as possible. Everywhere, it seems, there are people willing to look the other way and slip money under the table, so that people will complete the work they are unwilling to do themselves. It’s not perfect, but she has her friend by her side and the most cherished of Ani’s letters in her pack. It’s a start.

A year later, almost to the day, Shmi finds herself standing in a line outside the Shatterdome, Josa beside her. She adjusts the straps of her bag, slung over both shoulders, and moves forward a step along with everyone else. Her knees ache constantly, and standing in the heat for hours isn’t helping in the slightest. But Shmi only adjusts her bag again and resolves to withstand it. She’s so close now, she can’t give up in sight of the finish line.

It hasn’t been easy, though the hardest bit, perhaps, is the knowledge that she might be missing one of Ani’s infrequent letters, which she asked her old neighbor Ylyn to hold for her until she can settle more permanently somewhere.

The line moves forward again. Shmi reaches up to wipe some sweat off her forehead. She isn’t a young woman anymore. But after the attack from Steelbreaker, the first Category III kaiju on record, the U.S.-based PPDC desperately needs more bodies to repair the damage to the Shatterdome. It’s undoubtedly their in.

Josa links their arms together and, not for the first time since they left the slums, Shmi is unendingly grateful to have her friend with her. To think that she had tried to leave on her own.

It’s a blessed relief to finally make it into the building. A young J-Tech directs her toward one of several doors just inside the entryway to this part of the dome. She bids Josa goodbye-for-now and follows the J-Tech further into the Shatterdome. It’s not anywhere Qui-Gon took her on their tour, seven years ago, but then again, the Shatterdome is much, much bigger than she remembers it being. This is probably all new. 

Inside the room, there’s a table with two chairs sat across from each other. No one else is present yet, so Shmi takes the closest chair and tries not to sigh in relief as she finally, finally gets off her feet. 

She doesn’t know what she expects when the door opens again, some time later, but Qui-Gon Jinn, his hair fully gray now but still as long as when she first saw him eight years ago, is most certainly not it.

He stops just inside the threshold and gently pushes the door closed.

“Mr. Jinn,” she says, still trying to process this new development. Qui-Gon apparently takes this as permission to take the other seat, and then they are face to face, eyeing one another in wary silence.

He looks tired, and old, though she knows the same can be said about her as well. His shoulders are stooped now, not with faked defeat but age, and lines are carved deep into the skin around his eyes and mouth. She wonders if he carries any guilt for the pilots, now dead, that he had a hand in recruiting.

“Something tells me you don’t normally conduct interviews,” she says, after a lengthy silence in which Qui-Gon seems content to simply sit across from her.

“No,” he says, and his voice is just as deep as she remembers it being. “But someone recognized your last name, and after a bit of a scramble, it was decided that I would be the best one to speak with you.”

Shmi hopes she wasn’t indirectly responsible for pulling him out of something truly important, but, at the same time, relishes the little thrill of pleasure at potentially being an inconvenience. She knows it’s not _good_ to have that feeling, however, and pushes it away.

“Why are you here, Ms. Skywalker?” he asks, folding his hands together on the table.

“Please, just Shmi,” she tells him, suddenly feeling just as drained as if she was still standing out in the full afternoon sun. Every part of her aches. “I’m here for a job, same as anyone else. As is my friend, Josa Whitesun.”

Qui-Gon considers her for a moment. If Josa’s name means anything to him—and it should, as he was the one who recruited Beru as well, three years ago—nothing shows on his face. Then he says, “We cannot guarantee anyone a job, simply because they’re related to one of our pilots, Shmi.”

She swallows down the same cloying, choking bitterness that has kept its claws wrapped around her throat for nearly twenty years now. Curse this man for his patient, knowing eyes, his calm in the face of injustice all around him.

Shmi takes a deep, centering breath and says, “I understand that, Mr. Jinn. But Josa and myself have experience with manual labor, as well as service jobs and food preparation. We are prepared to do anything and everything needed here in the Shatterdome to support those working towards ending the conflict with the kaiju.”

“I wasn’t aware this was a joint interview,” he rebukes mildly. Shmi feels the anger rise up and lets it wash over her until it subsides. “There are many others with the same qualifications.”

She breathes, and breathes, and keeps her eyes open and fixed on him so the tears have no excuse to fall. To come this close and be stopped only now, when she stands in the same building as her son for the first time in years—she has no words for the feeling that is crushing her lungs, only that she is drowning.

“Then I suppose,” she says, and finds that her voice is shaking, “that there is nothing to distinguish me from the rest of those desperate people crowded outside of your doors. Nothing, other than the fact that you took my son from me and gave nothing in return.”

Qui-Gon doesn’t look guilted. He's just as unruffled as he was in her kitchen, once upon a time. 

There’s a knock at the door. When neither of them makes a move to admit the person, the door opens on its own and reveals Marshal Mace Windu himself. His buttons are just as shiny as the first time she saw him on TV, but there’s a grief in his face that wasn’t present then. 

Here, then, is a man who mourns those he sends out to die.

“Marshal Windu,” Qui-Gon says, surprise coloring his voice.

Windu lifts a hand to stop Qui-Gon from rising to salute. He shifts his eyes to assess Shmi, and she isn’t as shocked as she might’ve been to see kindness there.

“Imagine my surprise,” he starts, and his tone is full of a dry amusement that Shmi doesn’t expect, “when my meeting with the _President of the United States_ is interrupted by Mr. Skywalker and Ms. Whitesun, who had _somehow_ heard the news that their parents were somewhere in the building.”

Shmi’s heart jumps into her throat and she can’t hold back her smile. Ani may be grown, but he is still her headstrong son who never looks before he leaps.

“They were quite offended by the suggestion that their mothers might be turned away. It was all I could do to keep them from storming the rest of the Shatterdome in search of you,” Marshal Windu continues, not bothering to glance in Qui-Gon’s direction. He smiles, briefly. "They are quite talented recruits, I would hate for them to attempt a sit in as retaliation.”

“Knowing Anakin, he would manage to rope half of his graduating class,” Qui-Gon says, seemingly amused despite his best efforts otherwise. He stands and gives a respectful nod to Windu, and another to Shmi.

He’s still a large man who could be imposing if he chose to be. But beside Windu’s formidable presence, Qui-Gon Jinn is not the mountain of a man she remembers him as. He exits the room quietly and shuts the door behind him.

Marshal Windu stands where he is for a moment longer, and then moves to take the seat Qui-Gon just vacated. Once seated, he takes off his hat and places it on the table. The gesture humanizes him more than anything he could have done intentionally.

Shmi doesn’t find herself resenting him, now that he’s before her rather than just another official making empty promises. And, as it turned out, Windu’s promises _weren’t_ empty. She can respect a leader who grapples with a task and overcomes.

“So, Ms. Skywalker,” Marshal Windu says, looking her in the eye. “Please tell me what qualifies you for a position here at the Shatterdome.”

Shmi takes a breath.

The tour, this time, is much longer than it was eight years ago on account of the numerous additions they’ve made to the compound. The kwoon, no longer a single gym mat tucked into an out-of-the-way corner, sprawls out before her as the enthusiastic J-Tech assigned to give the new hires a tour shows them a shortcut to the cafeteria. She loses count after twenty mats and marvels at the way things change.

Josa, her arm linked once more with Shmi’s, takes it all in with wide eyes. Shmi is reminded that Josa hadn’t even had the comfort of seeing where her daughter ended up, back when Beru enlisted.

The group enters the cafeteria from a side door, situated on the second floor mezzanine that overlooks the main level, where the bulk of the tables and all of the food lines are situated. Shmi’s breathe catches at the sight of hundreds of people, from young students to grisled old techs that have likely been with the program since the beginning, all crammed together in one space and trying to eat as much as possible before they were called back to their tasks.

The J-Tech chatters on about meal slot rotations and which days to avoid the specials, but Shmi isn’t listening. Her eyes scan the crowds over and over, but there are too many people and she’s too far away. Her old eyes aren’t what they once were, and, if she’s being honest with herself, she wouldn’t know what to look for. Her Ani isn’t the same little boy she left here to be trained.

Josa’s fingers tighten on Shmi’s arm and she gasps. Shmi snaps her head around, following Josa’s gaze, and there’s a group of teens, hovering somewhere between the awkward gangliness of youth and the surety of adulthood. A tall young man jostles his shorter, stockier friend, one of a set of siblings—or cousins, at least, judging on the similarities between them—while a well-muscled blonde rolls her eyes at their antics. They all carry meal trays scraped clean as they head toward the stairs that lead to the main floor of the cafeteria. 

Josa’s grip on her bicep begins to ache, but Shmi pays it no mind. She would know that laugh anywhere.

Anakin glances up and catches sight of her. Shmi will remember his smile in this moment for the rest of her life.

“Mom!”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it! This could be seen as a prequel of sorts to my other pacrim au for Lady_Lombax, [ghost drift](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18517036), though I warn you, they vary wildly in tone and style.
> 
> Comments and kudos are always appreciated, but never required.
> 
> Read on,  
> Skats


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